


Medusa

by pprfaith



Series: Like the Greeks [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Also Meta, Angst, Author sucks at titles, Female Stiles Stilinski, Gen, Genderswap, Gore, Helpful Peter, I love Peter okay?, Lists, Murder, No Alpha Pack, Post Season 2, Pre-Relationship, Psycho Peter, Rule 63, Sassy Peter, Sorry for the Buffy References, Violence, Weird, attempts at humor, hints of PTSD, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-30
Updated: 2014-03-30
Packaged: 2018-01-17 14:01:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1390402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles makes lists and burns them. Derek keeps trying to save her, dragon slayer style. Nothing goes as planned and there’s way too much meta going on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Medusa

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, thanks to Chosenfire for giving me a second opinion on this. All typos are mine.
> 
> Secondly, we all knew this was coming because genderswap has, somehow, become a thing I do. Stiles though, oh, Stiles. After almost a dozen genderswap fics in almost as many fandoms, Stiles is the first character I have ever come across, where gender literally does not matter. His character traits, his personality. Nothing changed when I switched his chromosomes around and that is glorious. 
> 
> So yeah, this is my self-indulgent love song to all things Stiles Stilinski. I regret nothing.

+

Dad used to call her his good girl. When she did the laundry without him asking, when she cooked or got another A. “My good girl,” he said.

Stiles never noticed until he stopped. 

+

One of Stiles’ clearest memories of her mother is of the two of them sitting at the kitchen table, construction paper, crayons and a bottle of little pills between them. Stiles was newly diagnosed with ADHD and the meds were fucking with her something serious. 

“But if you can teach yourself to focus, you won’t need the pills so much, okay, sweetheart?” her mom said and Stiles remembers the sheen in her dark eyes with the wisdom of hindsight. Her mother was close to tears that day. 

She doesn’t know why. Maybe it was because her child was sick, because she was sicker, because Stiles almost didn’t sleep at all, those first few months on meds and everyone in the house was wrecked from her desperate tantrums. 

“So I’m going to show you how I concentrate, okay? I make lists, baby.”

Paper. Crayons. Lists. 

So many lists. Things to do today. Things to do tomorrow. Things to do every day. Things that Stiles can’t forget because they’re important. Times it’s okay to get distracted, times it’s not okay to get distracted. They made a dozen lists that day and taped them up all over the house.

The one that went on the fridge stayed there for years longer than Mom did. 

1\. It’s okay to play with food, as long as it stays on the plate.

2\. During dinner, we stay seated

3\. We don’t throw things.

4\. Stay away from the stove. 

Stiles still feels a sliver of guilt in her gut every time she ignores number 4. But there’s no-one else left to cook, so it’s her. 

Mom left, but the lists stayed and even though they don’t really help with the ADHD, they _help_.

+

After Gerard, Stiles makes too many lists. 

She makes a list of her injuries (bruised ribs, too many surface bruises, sprained wrist, three stitches just under her right eye and a temporary Glasgow smile from the gag, that thankfully disappears before Dad makes her see a doctor).

She makes a list of everything that’s gone wrong in the past year (everything) and one of everything that’s gone right (nothing). There is one for everyone who’s hurt her and one for everyone who’s protected her (Derek Hale is on both).

She makes a list for all the things she feels (panic, fear, despair, drowning, agony, spite, anger, rage, panic, exhaustion, loneliness) and one for everything she doesn’t feel (guilt. regret.).

She draws up calendar sheets and ticks off the days until the bruises fade, until the stitches come out. The days her dad doesn’t talk to her (addendum: list of lies she’s told him). The days since she asked Scott to give her space and he stopped so much as texting her. 

The days since she asked Derek to give her space and the number of times she’s seen the Camaro disappearing around odd corners since then. 

She makes tables for who saved her life how often, tallies how many times Scott has ignored her cries for help, how many times she’s been alone in the dark, the girl mixed up with wolves, the weakest link, the human.

She notes down everything Scott broke (six deputies, the police station, her dad, her trust, Erica, Boyd, Stiles herself, Derek, the list goes on), directly or indirectly by letting Gerard run wild.

She’d tick off all her bruises, but she stopped counting those when she was ten, because Stiles has always been a clumsy child. She still counts her pills though, every single day. There is a sheet by the mirror in her bathroom and she makes one more tally mark every single day. After Gerard, she makes two, takes another pill late and hopes it’ll chase sleep away for another night.

The most important lists she writes in red. One of them enumerates all the things she stands to lose. Item number one says _I could die (Dad would break)_. 

The other red list a simple to do list. Things to Do to Not Die. _Get protection_ , it says, and she compares sheet after sheet of bullet points and tallies, hunters vs Hales vs Scott’s pack vs humans vs herself.

Gerard’s face flashes behind her closed eyelids and she makes another tally on Flashbacks and Nightmares Had Since This Started. Allison shot Erica and Boyd. Allison was their friend and believed all the shit her family fed her. Allison held an arrow on Stiles at the warehouse, even if she didn’t shoot.

Allison probably never stood a chance but Stiles can’t forgive disloyalty. (Not in anyone but Scott. And even that…)

Humans means police means her father and she has pros and cons for telling him, but in the end, it always comes down to how fucking terrified she is of losing him, to truth or violence.

Herself. She’s not nearly as breakable as everyone seems to think she is, but the fact remains that she _can_ break and sooner or later she _will_. Stiles can deal with lonely, but she’d rather not be alone with the monsters. 

That leaves Derek or Scott. 

She folds a piece of paper down the middle, unfolds it, pens their names in her best chicken scratch at the top of the columns. Then she takes a long, hard look at all the lists scattered across her bed, thinks of how Derek snarled in blind, animal fury when he smelled the blood on her and how Scott has been ‘giving her space’ for ten days now without a single call. (There is a taste in her mouth, and it isn’t surprise. Not anymore. He went to Deaton for help. _Deaton_.)

She shoves all her lists into a pile, stuffs them into the trash can under her desk and carries it all into the backyard. There is no guilt over pouring some of her dad’s good whiskey over the whole mess because a) he shouldn’t drink anyway and b) there’s sensitive information here and Stiles is careless with herself, but never others. 

After taking a swig from the bottle, she places it safely out reach on the porch and then flicks the lighter and sets all her lists on fire. 

+

“What’d you do?” her father asks, bottle in hand, standing on the lowest porch step, staring at his only daughter, sitting next to the tiredly smouldering heap of ashes seeping through the trash can’s metal grating.

Stiles looks up at him, chin hooked over her knees. “I really needed to burn some shit. Sorry about the grass.”

There is a square burnt into it, black and dead. 

He sighs, sinks down on the steps. “Are you drunk?”

“No. Just needed an accelerant.”

“It’s paper,” he points out. A few lonely corners flew away on the wind instead of burning.

She snorts. “I needed that stuff to burn really. Badly.”

Silence falls between them and Stiles remembers when she was comfortable like this, sitting with her dad, without talking. It was the only time she really _could_ be silent. Now it just hurts. 

She tenses the muscles in her torso, listens to the low burn of her bruised ribs. “I’m sorry.”

Dad sighs tiredly. “You keep saying that. I just wish you’d tell me what you’re sorry _for_.”

Things Stiles isn’t Feeling: Guilt. Regret. 

“For making you sad.”

She rolls to her feet, less graceful than she’s ever felt, trips over her feet around her little bonfire and presses a kiss to her dad’s temple in passing.

+

It’s summer now, so Stiles has way too much time. Especially considering that her usual partner in crime is MIA. Again. (She makes a list of people she’s hung out with lately, adding up hours, and realizes her ‘usual partner in crime’ isn’t who it used to be.)

She goes for a walk in the woods. Not like the wolves do, running for the sake of running. Not like Lydia does, inspecting and cataloguing everything.

Stiles just slips into her rattiest shirt and shorts and hikes blindly into the wilderness, going where her feet carry her, wilfully unaware of everything. Somehow, she ends up on the far end of the preserve, thighs aching, calves burning, sitting by the lake.

She can feel her skin burn, her freckles grow darker and there is sweat caking dust to her body. Mosquitos swerve around her, discouraged by her BO. She slips her shoes off, sticks her grimy feet into the water and lets herself slump backwards against a smooth rock. The ribs burn. The sprained wrist throbs dully as a reminder. 

She feels almost at peace.

Suddenly something flickers, just under the surface of the water and she blinks, briefly blinded. It’s already gone by the time she’s finished blinking away spots.

She dismisses it, and it comes again, shiny silver and so bright. 

For minutes on end, she tries to track it, fails, looks away only to find it again, at the periphery of her vision, there-not-there. After the twentieth time she almost sees it, she’s about ready to vibrate straight out of her skin.

There!

There!

Now - 

She stands slowly, wades into the water. Her bare feet sting from the sharp rocks and her shorts grow heavy with water on her hips, but it’s so shiny, so very shiny, and she almost has it, can almost tell what it just, just a little closer, a little more. 

Just a few more feet and – 

An arm wraps about her waist, a steel band of muscle, raises her out of the water. Stiles struggles, whines against the strength containing her, elbows firing backwards, eliciting a grunt and a curse. She gets flung, too hard, toward the shore, where she lands on her back, rocks beating the air out of her lungs, lighting fire in her ribcage. She wheezes, bites off a scream, cusses. 

Then she blinks, blinks again and sees Derek, up to his hips in water, ripping at something small and slimy with both clawed hands. She blinks again, dizzy, and he’s looming above her, his eyes red as blood and his teeth too big. 

Losing time. Interesting.

Stiles wants to ask about the fangs, the claws, but all the grandmother jokes have been made and she’s not even wearing red today. She blinks a third time and he just sits there, beside her, his side pressed against her ribcage. His nose is bloody. She did that. His clothes are soaked. So are hers. But where Stiles probably smells like algae and sweat, Derek smells of ashes.

(Derek always smells of ashes. She inhales him anyway.)

She wheezes as she tries to sit up, flops back down. 

Eventually, “What was that thing?”

“Water sprite,” he answers, words lisping around his fangs. Still wolved then.

“I saw something, in the water.”

“It was a trick,” he growls, turning his furious gaze back on her. “To draw you in. You would have drowned. What the hell are you doing out here alone?”

That fact that he’s communicating in whole sentences, plural, too, is worrying.

“Out for a walk?” she half asks, then adds, “Bitch.”

The reference goes right over his head, as usual. 

(The thing is, after finding out about werewolves, Stiles mainlined Buffy for two weeks because, once it became obvious that she was going to be part of that crazy world, she needed pointers on how to be a kickass female running with monsters. 

She made a list for that, too, and it says things like, ‘Don’t fall in love with a creature of the night’ and ‘don’t piss off witches’, but it doesn’t really help at all because TV doesn’t teach you how to keep someone from drowning, or what it feels like when a skull caves in under your hands or how to keep the nightmares away. 

All she gets from it is a lot of stupid quotes that make people give her constipated looks, just like this.)

Derek snaps his teeth at her and she rolls her eyes.

“You should at least take Scott with you,” he reprimands, because Stiles is a fragile, breakable human who can’t be trusted with sharp things or her own safety. His own blood cakes his lips and chin, but she’s a fragile fucking porcelain doll. 

_At least Scott_ , he says, like Scott is the very least of things that can protect her. Like Scott is slightly better than nothing. She would have thought it spite, once upon a time. Not now.

“Scott hasn’t spoken to me since…,” she doesn’t finish the sentence because there is no good way to do it. There are too many open wounds here. Her life is a minefield of emotional damage. 

“What?” The surprise startles Derek right out of his wolf-ness and he turns blue-green-human eyes at her. “You’re his pack. Why isn’t he looking after you? You’re still hurt.”

Honestly baffled, like it’s impossible to imagine, leaving a pack mate on her own. Stiles doesn’t know if it’s growing up in a house full of wolves, or if it’s just Derek, but his inability to lie is charming, somehow. The helpless, guileless way he puts everything out there, defending with fists and claws and, most of all, silence, but never with lies. It’s a lot like her desperate babble, covering up the holes.

And isn’t it a strange universe, where Stiles Stilinski understands Derek Hale?

She smiles at him and her cheek doesn’t even sting anymore. The stitches came out three days ago. “I don’t think I am, though.”

Lists and lists and lists, tally marks and her one and only reason to stay alive: keep Dad from breaking. ‘I don’t want to die’ doesn’t come in until later. The ways Derek has saved her and she him, the ways they work together even when on opposing sides and all that could (might) mean. 

“Am I yours?” She makes it sound flippant, like a joke, let me join your secret boy band, please? It’s easier than begging him to keep her safe, to lend her fangs and claws to keep the darkness at bay. To fight her monsters for her, to keep her alive so the last of her family won’t fall apart again.

“Why do you want to be?” Some people have turned self-loathing into an art. Derek is not one of them. His is clumsy and blunt, something that leaves him bruised all over, still, even after a decade of practice.

“Because I can’t die.” Not ‘don’t want to’. Can’t. Not before her dad. And Stiles has no illusions as to her chances of surviving this world on her own. She can’t walk away (she just can’t), and she can’t make it on her own. A baseball bat and a fistful of ashes won’t carry her through. Gerard was human and he was almost enough. Sticking with the theme of quoting Spike, Gerard almost had himself a very good day. 

Derek stares at her until she gets unsettled, long and hard, eyebrows drawn together. Somewhere under there is the lost boy she met once, in her father’s office, stinking of death and soot. He’s closer, she thinks, than he used to be. Scott used him, Erica and Boyd abandoned him, Peter bled him dry, literally.

Derek keeps failing, somehow. He’s supposed to rule them, to be the alpha, but all he is, is everyone’s punch line. 

She knows the feeling.

“I’m not a very good alpha,” he says, like it’s a simple fact, truth she should now. He’d never say it to any of the others, but he says it to her, here, now. Somewhere along the line, Derek stopped being silent around her.

She shrugs. “I’m not a very good human.”

(Matchie, matchie.)

+

He walks her back to her car, gripping bruises into her skin where he keeps her from falling, ass over teakettle, over tree roots and into foxholes. She walks barefoot because her wet, bloody feet won’t go back in her shoes and it feels strange, the soil under her feet, the leaves and dirt. She barely makes any sound, unless she’s stumbling and yelping. 

By the jeep they stop, awkwardly. Their clothes have semi-dried and Stiles’ shorts are glued to her skin, damp and cool and awful. She aches again, rubs a hand over her face and winces at the sting. She feels terribly, terribly, uncoordinatedly human.

Derek’s hand is there, suddenly, too big, too close, and his thumb traces the small red line under her eye, three stitches, only a tiny scar, my dear, you’ll barely be able to see it. He sucks away the flicker of pain and then lets his hand rest there, on her face. 

He runs too hot. Stupid wolf. 

Stiles once made a list of all the physiological differences between humans and werewolves. She wrote down ‘hotness’ twice and felt very raunchy and clever for it. 

“I would have killed him for that alone,” the alpha finally whispers, voice gone too low with animal rage. He’s standing too close, but he doesn’t scare her. For all the things Derek has done, ‘scaring Stiles’ has never been one of them. 

Even in the beginning, walls and steering wheels and all, she always remembered that boy in Daddy’s office. Derek Hale. The boy who watched his life burn. Some days it’s like he hasn’t seen anything else in almost seven years.

She wonders, randomly, if Kate kept up the act after the fire, if she tried to ‘console’ him before driving the blade home with the truth. She wonders if Derek loved her. 

Slowly, Stiles raises her hand to his, wraps her fingers around it and pulls it away from her face. She doesn’t know if werewolves can draw enough damage from you to heal scars, or at least fade them, but she doesn’t want to risk it. She needs that reminder.

“I already did that,” she reminds him, herself.

List of People Stiles Killed: Mom, Peter Hale, Gerard Argent. 

It’s ironic how, in the end, it wasn’t one of the monsters that killed Gerard. It was a damaged sixteen-year-old girl with a baseball bat, lingering behind the doorway that marked his secret escape route, armed with pain and hate and a bat. 

It’s funny how Stiles smashed his head in without hesitation, without even blinking, and kept hitting him until someone pulled her off. He was still human, bitten but unturned. He was sick and human and breakable and she killed him like she killed Peter, cold-blooded and certain.

She understands, perhaps, in hindsight, why Scott is staying away.

“I’m sorry you had to,” Derek tells her, because Derek always, always blames himself. She doesn’t have a tally for his kills, but she thinks she’s actually ahead of him, right now. What does that say about her?

“I’m not,” she retorts because Stiles lies badly to everyone, but never at all to herself. 

She squeezes his hand and drops it, slips into her jeep. He still stands there as she turns a corner, growing smaller in the distance. 

+

“Jackson is leaving for the summer. His parents think it will be good for him,” Lydia says, sipping her double cappuccino with skim milk foam, vanilla and hazelnut syrup, sweetener, cocoa powder, and, possibly, virgin blood. Stiles, sitting across from her with a tall black (seven sugar), feels terribly grown-up. She is having coffee at Starbucks with Lydia Martin and she didn’t even fuck up ordering.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Lately, it’s become her default. Stiles is always sorry, except for all things she’s not sorry for. 

(She had a list, once, of ways to make Lydia Martin fall in love with her, to make that big, giant, brilliant brain notice her, notice _Stiles Stilinski_. It went in the trash can with all the others.)

“I’ve convinced my parents that I need to further my education during the summer. I’ve found a summer programme with late admittance.”

So Lydia is leaving, too. She has what she wanted, after all. Her man back by her side. Jackson is a full wolf now. He’s as safe as he’ll ever be again. Stiles doesn’t know why she expected the other girl to stay beyond that.

The look on the Lydia’s face is almost pity. They’ve become friends, or something close to it, in the past few months, and now… Stiles shakes her head. It’s always been a pipe-dream, the two of them, and Stiles always knew it. Lydia is beautiful and brilliant and unreachable and sometimes Stiles thinks that why she fixated on her, write bisexual on her flag and ran with it. Because it was safe, that bubble of being the dyke with the unattainable crush and the male best friend.

It’s why she wants to hold on to it, even now. Because it’s safe. But, well. “Getting away from memories?”

“No,” Lydia says. It’s at least half a lie. “This town is dangerous, Stiles, and I am self-aware enough to know I can’t survive it on my own. Jackson will be back in fall, and so will I. Until then, Beacon Hills is too dangerous for me.”

They share a grim smile at that because, yes. They are human girls running with wolves. Their own mortality is a close friend. 

(Stiles has never even considered running. Never considered how easy it would be to stay with her aunt for the summer, visit her family in Europe. She hasn’t set foot outside Beacon Hills since it became the freaking hellmouth and she never wonders why.)

“The packs could protect you.” She has practiced saying that. The packs. Two separate entities. She used to think she could get Scott and Derek to work together, that they would be one pack, at some point. But Scott used Derek like a blunt instrument, used him like Kate and Peter and god knows who else and Stiles could forgive that (because Stiles is not very good at being human and never has been), but Derek never will. 

Lydia snorts into her coffee. “Scott can’t protect anyone and Derek has Peter.”

It sounds simple. Derek has Peter. It isn’t. 

“I can’t be where Peter is.”

Damage, Stiles is learning, is accumulative. “You’ll find a way to get even,” she says, because she is sure the other girl will. She’s equally sure it won’t really change anything.

+

“Scott,” she tells his voicemail, “Scott, buddy, how are you? Call me.”

He calls. Three days later, on route to work and kind of hurried, he calls. She tells him that she’s done needing space. He tells her he’ll talk to her later. 

Stiles remembers a time when Scott was sometimes the only person she talked to for days, beside her dad, and Scott talked to her just as much. When it was just the two of them, orbited by Melissa and Dad, living in their own little world where he was Ken and she was Barbie and they played Black Ops until three in the morning and life was easy.

Then: werewolves. 

And it was still okay, because Stiles was the only one who knew, so Scott stuck with her. These days, everyone and their mom knows about his furry problem. He even has Melissa back, now that she knows, and Stiles…. 

You hear about how sandbox friendships never really last, because people change too much growing up, and rarely in the same ways. But Stiles didn’t ever think she and Scott were like that. 

(Sucker.)

She hums into the phone in something that’s neither agreement nor indignation anymore.

Right before hanging up on her, he stops, breathes and says, “I’m glad you’re okay.”

+

She still has a fistful of mountain ash, just the one. She keeps it in a jar under her bed, close at hand, and is never really sure if she can actually use it. If she will ever actually need to use it, because the last monster was human when she caved his skull in. 

But then she remembers that her life is never that easy. She spends an entire morning staring at the jar until it feels like the jar is staring back at her. 

She puts down plastic tarp and practices circle-making on it, carefully sweeping every single particle back into the glass every time, until she can just do it with a thought and a swish of her hand. 

She feels like Hermione Granger, throws up her hand and lets the circle fall around her, perfect and closed. 

She feels powerful. 

+

Derek’s eyes, before he became an alpha, were blue. 

Stiles looked it up once, the eyes. Gold and blue and red. Pure and tainted and alpha.

If she were a werewolf, would her eyes be blue now? 

+

She draws up a new calendar in black and purple sharpie and marks off the days _without_ nightmares. For the novelty of it. She makes it to seven before Scott shows up at her doorstep, Chinese take-out held in front of him like an offering.

“Hey,” he says, expression sheepish. “Isaac says I might have been being a bad friend to you? I’m sorry about that, Stiles.”

She sighs, because of course, of courses someone else had to tell him. Of course. But he’s here.

She’ll take it. 

+

They eat Chinese until they feel like bursting and then they curl up on the sofa, controllers in hand and play until Stiles feel like her thumbs will fall off and it’s almost like it was before other people invaded their bubble and things like sex and gender and fighting for survival started to matter. They trash talk each other mercilessly, kicking and elbowing each other in turn, cheating. 

Empty coke bottles keep piling up at their feet and by the time they look up from their game, the Sheriff has come and gone, leaving behind a note on the kitchen table telling them to clean the hell up and get some sleep.

He’s pulling a double again. (It’s the third this week while he’s trying to clean up a mess he still doesn’t understand.)

They leave the detritus of their game night and crawl under Stiles’ comforter together like children. Or puppies. 

Scott locks his arms around her waist and she bumps their foreheads together. The early morning shines through the blanket in fuzzy oranges and reds and Stiles says, “You fucked up so badly.”

She expects him to fight, to get angry, to yell. Lately, all they seem to do is yell. All Scott seems to be is angry. There is a list titled Times Scott Tried to Kill Me. To date, it has seven dates scribbled across it. But today he shrinks into himself the way he did before he became powerful and very quietly protests, “I didn’t have a choice.”

“You could have come to me. You can _always_ come to me.”

“It was too dangerous.” Telling Gerard where to find what he needed at the station was dangerous. Switching out his meds was dangerous. Aiming and firing Derek was dangerous. Scott has never seen past what’s in front of him. Stiles is the one who thinks.

“For who?” she asks because she knows the answer. Scott has never had a problem risking her life and she never figured out if that’s trust or carelessness. 

It still hurts, but only dully now. The anger covers up the holes.

In a way, Derek has picked the ideal pack. They’re all _perfect_ because they are all such gorgeous train wrecks. 

The sick, the abused, the lonely, the children from broken homes who raised themselves. Even Jackson and Lydia are perfectly damaged. 

They’re ruthless and selfish, dangerous in their greed for acceptance, for safety. Animals perhaps, more so than the wolves some of them carry inside of them, because they will do anything, anything at all, to protect themselves and those they consider theirs. Greedy fuckers, all of them, and Derek is the greediest of them all because he collected them and made them _his_.

But Derek didn’t pick Scott, and perhaps that’s the root of the problem. 

Allison and his mom matter to Scott, but the rest of them are an afterthought. Stiles would bend rules and break bones to protect him, but Scott.

(And when did Stiles start to count herself as one of Derek’s?)

“I love you, dude,” she tells her best (only) friend. “You’re a fucking asshole, but I love you.”

He’s smart enough to be gone when she wakes and Stiles sits there, curled up in a bed that smells like him, wondering if this is what growing-up feels like and can she please give it back?

+

Stiles makes more lists, steals more booze, burns it all and gets dizzy on the fumes. 

Her father asks if this is going to become a ritual and she intones, solemnly, that there is power in repetition. 

Things That Repeat: Hales die in fire, people hurt Stiles to get to Scott, even though Scott never notices, Allison matters more, Derek is a fucking idiot who protects her when she doesn’t ask him to, Peter. She’s written Peter’s name down thrice. For emphasis.

They have pizza delivered and Dad lets her put on Titanic and cry all three hours and fourteen minutes through because it’s not like she doesn’t know how it ends.

+

Erica and Boyd show up just after midnight, dirty, bloody and stinking of fear badly enough for even Stiles to smell it.

They stop just inside her window, crouched defensively, their eyes wide and glowing brightly in the dark. (The last time she saw them, they were all bloody and so, so close to breaking.)

Stiles rolls to her feet, stumbles, almost falls and then just gives up on grace entirely and wraps her arms around both of them, awkwardly and carelessly, because they’re alive, they’re alive, oh god, at least someone in this fucking mess is alive and okay. 

“Where have you been, what happened? I know Argent let you go, the others have been looking for you, but there was no trace, the scent disappeared, I have been worried fucking sick, for fuck’s sake…”

She keeps going and it doesn’t matter that they aren’t even really friends, that Boyd doesn’t like her and Erica hasn’t spoken to her voluntarily since they outgrew My Little Pony in sixth grade, it doesn’t matter that they left, that they abandoned everyone, that Stiles didn’t go back for them like she should have. 

It doesn’t matter that she made lists and lists of where they could have gone, what could have happened, how they could be found. 

Because Erica sniffles into Stiles’ shoulder and Boyd melts into her and Stiles adds their names to People to Protect and to Pack, strikes them from People I Failed and holds them tight 

+

Boyd tells her, in sparse words, what happened while Erica showers away weeks of grime. They ran after Chris Agent released them, straight into the arms of another pack. It wasn’t better than Beacon Hills. Bigger, but not better.

“Derek cares,” Boyd rumbles as he stands, switches places with Erica, who tumbles herself into Stiles’ lap and holds tight. 

She wraps her arms around the other girl and waits until the shower turns on again before asking, “Why me? Why not go to Derek?”

Erica shrugs. “You were there.” In the basement. “You’re Stiles.”

That… doesn’t tell Stiles anything. Nevermind. She’ll bring Derek back his betas in the morning. 

+

“Yo,” she calls in front of his SWL (Super Werewolf Lair TM), “I brought you something!”

Derek comes racing out of the door, followed a split second later by Isaac. Both of them freeze. Erica and Boyd lower their heads, necks bared, ashamed and afraid. 

Their alpha breathes in their scent. 

+

“Dude, it smells like Derek in here?” Scott announces, leans over and sniffs her shirt. “ _You_ smell like Derek. Why do you smell like Derek?”

Stiles wedges her hand between his face and her shoulder, shoves backwards. “Derek doesn’t lie to me.”

He’ll lie for her, though, she thinks. Lie and steal and kill. Probably. She knows she would for him. For any of them.

She guesses that makes her the cheap, desperate lay Jackson once accused her of being, after they stopped being kind-of friends in seventh grade.

Scott looks like she sucker punched him with werewolf strength and she guiltily thinks, _good_.

+

There are vampires in Beacon Hills.

There are fucking vampires in Beacon Hills because of course they are. This is Stiles’ life. She questions her choices and then doesn’t anymore because she needs her breath to run and her big brain to try and figure out a way out of this mess, because. Vampires. 

She turns another corner, almost loses her grip on her bat (she keeps it in her car now, always, thanks a lot), and hopes she’ll have a really good idea. Soon. 

Or, better yet, _right now_ , because these suckers (ha) are more gymnastically inclined than even Derek and one of them is suddenly in front of here when it should have been behind.

It (he, he, let’s face it, Stiles can’t call them things, not when she runs with wolves, who are far, far too human), he crouches low in front of her, fangs extended and eyes glowing a pale, icy blue. She has half a ridiculous thought on whether or not the colours work the same for vamps as for wolves. Do baby vampires have golden eyes until their first dinner?

“You’re funny,” the blood sucker hisses, and whoops, she was talking out loud again. 

“Is it going to make you not eat me?” she asks.

He cocks his head to one side, inhales her. Behind her, the other two spread and cover. “No.”

Ways Stiles Refuses to Die: sucked dry by a badly punning vampire asshole.

He crouches lower, muscles tensing and as he leaps, Stiles swings her trusty bat as hard as she can. She’s fragile and she’s human and she’s breakable. Doesn’t mean she’s going to take it lying down. 

Or at all.

She swings and it’s probably simply the element of surprise that gets the hit to connect, but connect it does. Hard. 

Too bad vampires heal about as fast as wolves. And that there’s three of them.

Stiles goes flying forward into the bleeding, howling one on the ground, another one riding her back, the third breaking the bat from her hand like both are made of matches. The injured one bites like a rabid animal, getting her forearm good.

She howls, kicks, screams, and suddenly the one on her back is gone. She punches the bloody one in the face, kicks him off and feels the third one flying over her head as Derek roars hard enough to shake the walls of the alley.

Stiles rolls until her back hits wood, gropes for the bat with the hand that isn’t mangled and swings just in time to keep the first vampire off her and then she keeps swinging.

Elbows, knees, face. Anything fragile. Anything that takes longer to heal. By the time Derek has torn the other two to pieces and dust, hers is a whimpering pulp on the ground. The wolf grabs him, twists his head clean off.

A breeze catches most of him before he hits the ground and then Derek puts his hands on her shoulders, mindful of his claws, and ducks his head to look in her eyes.

His own are terribly, terribly red. 

There is blood on his face, dripping down his chin. He bit one of the vampires. Stiles laughs because, god, the dog jokes, and then she tips forward into him. He smells of leather and blood and old corpses under the ever-present ashes and she doesn’t care, just shuffles closer and breathes through the pain. 

+

“Why the bat?” Derek asks, mostly to distract her from the tugging sensation of Deaton stitching the shreds of her arm back together. 

His hand, still bloody but less clawed, rests on her bare calf, sucking away the pain in blackish lines.

Stiles shrugs and regrets it. Bruises again. She’ll count them later and forget their number for her own sanity. Days Without Nightmares: back to zero. “When my Dad started working nights, Melissa gave it to me. Showed me a few dirty tricks. Taught me everything I know.”

“Aim for the bits that hurt and run,” Melissa recommended with the hard air of a woman who knows the way the world works when you’re female and alone.

Stiles cocked her head, swung the bat again and asked, “Wouldn’t it make more sense to hit the bits you need?”

(That day, Stiles almost felt like having a mom again. She should visit Melissa, she thinks, sometime soon. But first, she should probably get over the ugly anger she still harbours against Scott right now.) 

Melissa taught Stiles to go for the easy hit and then run. Her dad taught her to go for eyes, ears and crotch. 

Stiles taught herself to target joints and neck, to keep going until someone stops. Or rather, she didn’t need to be taught at all. 

Deaton hums over her arm and if he did facial expressions, he’s either look displeased or angry. Derek growls low in his throat, so Stiles asks, “What’s with the riding to the rescue thing, anyway? That’s the second time you popped out of nowhere to save my ass.”

She’s grateful and resentful in equal measure and has no idea which emotion to go with. She settles for neither and keeps on keeping on because it’s better than crying.

The eyebrows converge. “More like the twentieth.”

Not getting in that.

“Alone in the woods, there you are. Alone in town, there you are. Stalker much?”

He nudges the bat on the floor with his foot. “I thought you might like a little help,” he says, and it’s possible he’s smiling.

Stiles huffs. Deaton scowls. “Hold still.”

+

“She didn’t teach me to hit to kill,” Stiles tells Derek later, curled around her hurt arm, back against the Camaro’s passenger side door, staring at Derek’s profile in the dark. She texted her dad earlier that she’s sleeping at Erica’s.

Derek clenches his hands into fists around the steering wheel, says nothing. 

+

She wakes surrounded by the scent of burnt things and coffee, untangles herself from a pile of ratty blankets and realizes she slept on the dilapidated sofa in the ruins of what was once a living room.

The scent of coffee comes from the Starbucks cup Peter is dangling over her face. “Coffee,” he offers. 

Peter.

Lists pertaining to Peter: Ways he is Insane, Ways he Ruined Everyone’s Lives, Creepy Shit he Does, Magical Things to Ask him About (Does that make you a zombie, dude?) and People Stiles Killed.

He once threatened to murder her and stuff her in his trunk, then offered her super powers in the same breath and finally just left her standing there, defenceless, useless and used. On better days, he only gives her a little bit of whiplash.

Peter, who died and then came back from the dead with a goatee and a smirk, asking Stiles if she missed him without a trace of irony. 

She accepts the drink and doesn’t test for arsenic, just sips it with a grateful hum. Her arm is throbbing like it wants to fall off. 

“Where’s the others?”

“Derek took his puppies for a walk along the border,” Peter supplies, sitting down next to her. He _smells_ alive. It’s weird. (She expected him to smell of ashes, like Derek, but he only ever smelled of sickness and now… nothing. Alive. Normal. He smells like a person.)

“Derek wouldn’t leave me alone with you,” she says, because she’s fairy certain of that, at least.

Except he did. The wolf shrugs, leans back and drinks his own coffee happily, complaining about the state of the house under his breath. Stiles watches him the way one watches a wild animal that just happens to wander into one’s backyard.

“My nephew told me you beat a vampire to death last night.”

“I don’t think that’s technically possible.”

“With a bat.” He mimes a swing with one hand, balancing his cup in the other. “Just like old man Gerard.”

He waits for her to fill the silence. For once, she doesn’t because she’s kind of busy with the realization that Derek didn’t only leave her with Peter, he left her with Peter _on purpose_. This is, like, a fucking intervention. Oh god. Her leg is bouncing endlessly, but she blames that on her missed Adderall. 

“It seems to be your murder weapon of choice, that bat.”

Her coffee is getting cold. There’s too much sugar in it (which is saying something, coming from her) and she’s sure Peter did that on purpose. In lieu of poisoning her, or something.

“Except for me,” he finally says, a punch line five minutes delayed. 

Except for him. (Too many exceptions for this early in the morning.) Because him she killed with fire. The man who burned to death once, she killed again with fire. She could have liberated her dad’s shotgun (Because buckshot is hell on werewolves. They heal over it.). She could have taken Kate’s dropped gun (wolfsbane bullets, motherfucker). She could have thrown fucking rocks or run him over with Jackson’s damn car.

She chose fire. 

Peter chuckles. “You shouldn’t feel bad, Stiles,” he tells her, patronizingly. “I would have done the same thing.”

 _I don’t want to be like you_.

_I think I may already be._

“And you know why?”

She shakes her head, mutely, bites back on a stream of consciousness that would leave her out of breath and even more naked in front of psycho Peter than she already feels.

“Because people like us live longer. Don’t be ashamed of surviving.”

He waves a hand to indicate himself, top to bottom. See? Ultimate survivor, he is, and all he had to do is mentally torture a seventeen-year-old girl for a few months and almost bleed his nephew dry.

(All Stiles had to do so far is this: fight off her best friend, who keeps trying to kill her, set a man who burned to madness on fire again, keep Derek afloat in a pool for two hours, get tortured, kill her torturer with a baseball bat, kill a vampire – and that’s just the bullet points.)

She takes a deep breath and deflects the hell out of… everything. “Do you have any idea how fucking creepy that is? You’re possibly the most psychotic of psychos I have ever met – no, don’t take it as a compliment – I’ve met Gerard goddamn Argent, and you think that there’s any kind of… of compliment in what you just said? Have you looked back on your life choices lately? I mean, have you, because, dude, so many wrong choices there. Seriously. It’s like…”

She waves her good arm around, flailing for a fitting analogy.

Peter smiles at her, the soft, gentle one that borders on slimy, and stands, putting his empty cup on a nearby crate. He leans down, too close, too close, Mayday, and whispers, hot against her neck, “You want to live, don’t you, Stiles?”

+

Things Stiles Wants:

1\. To keep her dad safe and sane.

2\. To stay alive.

3\. To protect her friends.

4\. To not be afraid anymore.

+

Erica and Boyd… cling to her, for lack of a better term, and Stiles doesn’t know if it’s the basement, the night they came back, or something in between, but half her mornings she finds them in bed with her.

She leaves them be for the summer, but when fall rolls around, she buries her hand in Erica’s curls, tugs her around so they’re face to face and asks, “Why are you here? And don’t tell me it’s because I’m me because I a) know that and b) what does that even mean?”

Boyd shifts on the blonde’s other side, hand on her hip flexing. He makes no move to pull Stiles off though and see? That’s the weirdness.

Erica blinks doe eyes at Stiles and Boyd says, “You protected us. You turned down the current enough for us to heal without anyone noticing. You killed Gerard.”

No-one, Stiles thinks, has ever asked how long they were down there, or what Gerard did to them. Werewolves don’t scar. 

“He needed to die,” she says and gropes around for guilt, comes up empty-handed, as usual.

“Yes,” Boyd agrees and then transfers his hand from his girlfriend’s hip to hers, draws them all together into a pile of bodies.

+

Isaac’s birthday is a week before school starts and they throw him a pack party. Stiles makes lopsided cake, Erica forces everyone to wear party hats and they laugh, first too hesitantly and then too quietly.

They fall asleep in a pile, Peter and Derek flanking them, like gargoyles keeping away the dark.

The next morning Stiles downs her Adderall in Derek’s derelict bathroom and realizes, startled, that she hasn’t ticked off her pills in days, possibly weeks.

+

She burns the list. 

An entire binder full of tick marks, some written in crayon, some in ink, growing smaller and straighter as she grows older, each one a pill, each one a day with her mind dulled and sharpened at the same time. 

She hates her Adderall and loves it in equal measure and wads every single sheet into a ball, sticks them in her trusty, sooty trash can and goes outside. There, she pulls another list from her pocket, smooths it along her thigh. 

She lights the bottom corner and uses it to set the whole mess ablaze. While ten years of chemical dependence go up in smoke, she flings the first sheet to the ground and stomps out the flames, leaving it there, singed but legible, visible. 

Sitting in the grass, she watches a decade of pills burn and when the fire is mostly out, she pours a jug over water from the kitchen over it and leaves the sad remains for her dad to find.

+

Things I Should Tell Dad:

1\. If you keeps sneaking donuts, you’ll die and that’s not okay.

2\. I love you.

3\. I’d tell you, but there’s too many people depending on me to keep them safe.

4\. The people you sometimes hear in my room are not my orgy friends. They just get nightmares.

5\. It’s not your fault that Mom died.

6\. It’s also not your fault that I’m screwed-up. 

7\. I miss when you called me a good girl, even though it’s patronizing.

8\. I don’t think I deserve being called that anymore, anyway, though. 

9\. I wish you’d – 

The rest is burned away. She made sure of that.

+

On the first day of school, Allison says, “I’ll stay out of your way.”

She looks less psycho than she did last year, but the shot Boyd and Erica and she held a weapon on Stiles while Stiles murdered her grandfather, so.

Stiles nods. “That’s a good idea,” she says, just that. She’s proud of the steel in her voice.

+

On the second day of school, Scott says, “I had no choice,” and Boyd does them all a favour by punching him in the face. 

Stiles helps Scott hide the damage, gives him her gym shirt to change into and then hugs him, burying her face in his neck and breathing him in. She misses his dumb bowl cut. 

“Fix it,” she hisses, before letting Erica pulls her away.

She thinks he nods as she goes, but she can’t be sure. 

+

Stiles keeps a list of all the monsters she refuses to accept might exist until she’s proven otherwise. Item twenty-seven on that list is _fucking minotaurs_.

“I guess I can cross that off,” she mutters, sitting between Isaac and Peter on the sofa, watching Derek pace, rubbing absently at the still healing scar along his arm from where the _minotaur_ tried to gore him with its _horns_.

Peter gives her a sideways look. She shrugs. “I have a list,” she elaborates.

Derek snarls at them to shut up. 

Right. “I’m getting my research on.”

Peter raises a hand, “I’m with Stiles.”

That is actually, surprisingly, okay, because everyone else can’t seem to tell a book from a brick, but Stiles still gives him a saccharine smile and coos, “Aww, look at you, being Daddy’s little helper!”

“Keep your gender issues under control, Stiles,” the wolf shoots right back, because the whole sexual identify thing is kind of a sore spot for Stiles and Peter does so like to poke at those. With a smirk, he leads the way upstairs, where he keeps the few books that survived the fire, and his laptop. (It’s not the one that belonged to the nurse. Stiles checked.)

They settle in to find out whatever they can about this week’s monster in silence, but there isn’t much to find. The myth is Greek, so the books don’t cover much of it and the internet has way too much information, most of which is crap. Story of Stiles’ life. 

There isn’t even coffee, damn it.

“Okay,” she says around midnight, trying to fight down a yawn. “I have seven possible ways to kill one of those things and none of them look easy.”

“Do they look likely?” Peter drawls, eyes unfocused like he’s listening to something beyond the room. “Because I think…”

And whatever he meant to say gets lost because a roar shakes the house suddenly and they’re tumbling downstairs and outside to find the pack ringing the porch steps, facing outward, claws and fangs on full display. Derek is on all fours, a true wolf, eyes burning red, red, red. 

Peter takes one look at her bare hands, bat left in the car, before shoving her back toward the porch and joining his alpha. 

+

Ten minutes later Erica is out with what _sounded_ like a shattered ribcage, Boyd is incoherent with rage, crouched over her defensively, Isaac is unconscious, Peter keeps getting flung around like a rag doll and Derek is visibly flagging. 

Stiles can’t get past the fight at her car, so she’s absolutely useless. Then the half-human, half-bull creature ducks and takes another run at Derek, who tries to evade but isn’t fast enough this time. 

One of the minotaur’s horns gets his left hind leg, digging in deep and there is too much blood and the sound and Stiles doesn’t think. Derek is being gored (again) but the minotaur is stuck with his head down and horns occupied, so she runs forward and full tilt, skips over Peter who doesn’t even try to stop her. 

Derek will hate her for this, will probably kill her if she survives, but she has a list in her head, Ways to Kill a Minotaur and they’re ranked by probable effectiveness and opportunity and everyone will be dead soon anyway.

(She’s too fucking used to that.)

So she kicks at the base of the horn buried in her alpha’s side, kicks hard and hears it break. Derek howls in pain, the minotaur bellows in rage and she kicks again, feels resistance from both sides, Derek’s flesh and the minotaur’s head, and then the horn breaks and she grips it with both hands and pulls.

If Derek bleeds out he will hate her from the afterlife. 

Stiles doesn’t want to have to add him to her murder list. 

So she just hopes for the best and lunges for the minotaur, pointy end of the horn aimed for his heart. 

Unfortunately she is just one measly human, so she ends up being flung aside with the horn buried in the monster’s chest, but not nearly deeply enough. She scrambles backwards on hands and feet at it comes stomping at her like a real bull and then Derek is there, going for the throat, biting down hard enough to make blood spray and then he’s human and still holding on to the ruin of the minotaur’s neck, his left leg hanging limp and useless and his hands going for the horn, driving it home. 

The minotaur falls backwards and Derek goes with it. Stiles throws herself forward just in time to keep the dumb wolf from impaling himself on the other end of the horn. Again.

She twists them both, manages to not land under 200 pounds of wounded alpha muscle and rolls, painfully, back to her feet. The minotaur has stopped roaring, but he’s still breathing, slowly, agonizingly. 

So Stiles kneels next to him, reaches for the blood-slippery horn and twists it one last time, opening the wound wide enough for the end to come sooner. The creature twitches once and then falls silent. 

Behind her, Peter slow claps. 

+

“So,” Isaac asks, still douched up by the high of battle and his own healing, “who gets the kill? Derek or Stiles?”

Erica snorts and then grimaces at the pain. “Stiles killed it twice. Derek killed it once. Go, Batman.”

Derek, prone on the ratty sofa, with his hip _destroyed_ thanks to Stiles ripping a huge hole into it, growls lowly. Boyd picks up Erica and carries her off. Isaac trails after them, followed by Peter, who throws a two fingered salute at Stiles before disappearing. 

Huh. 

“I’m sorry,” she tells him, worrying at her lower lip with her teeth. “For, you know.” She points at his middle, where his junk is covered up by a cheap fleece blanket that’s stained dark with his blood. 

He tries to move, groans in pain, and suddenly she’s next to him, telling him to stop moving, hush, it’s fine. He growls. Again. 

(Things That Repeat: everything.)

Without letting herself think about it, she nudges him up until there’s space behind his back and sits down so he can rest his head on her thigh. When he moves to complain, she slings an arm across his chest. “Dude. You have a hole in your hip and it’s my fault. Chill it.”

“You did the right thing,” he tells her and upside down, his frown still isn’t a smile. 

Silence settles between them and Stiles starts stroking his hair without really noticing. She tries to think of something to distract herself with, but there’s nothing. No lists to review, no tally marks to make, no tangent to go off on. She’s tired. There’s blood caked under her nails and a pack spread throughout the burnt house she’s sitting in.

There’s a naked, wounded alpha in her lap and she hasn’t talked to her father in three days, to Scott in five. There is a scar on her face from where an old man beat her bloody because of who she is loyal to and a bigger one on her arm from when a vampires tried to kill her. 

“I want to protect you,” Derek says into the silence, a low growl.

Water sprites, vampires, minotaurs. And that’s just the past few months. 

Fire bombs and baseball bats and horns and Peter asking her if she wants to live. There isn’t even bile to swallow back. All important decisions, she realizes, were made months ago. 

All lists are useless now.

“I don’t need you to,” she answers, tugging on his hair just because she can. There is a contradiction in there, somewhere, the way she desperately wants to be safe, wants Derek and the pack to protect her and, at the same time, doesn’t, launches herself at every fight she can find, fragile and breakable and _angry_. 

She can’t reconcile it. 

She doesn’t think she has to. 

Derek arches into the pull on his hair and rolls his eyes upwards to meet her gaze, flashing alpha red at her.

“I know,” he murmurs and there’s something like relief in his voice. He rolls, slowly, painfully, until he’s lying on his side. It’s the wrong way, his injured hip pressing into the sofa springs, but he bears it with a grunt to bury his face in her stomach, right where she’s softest. If he wolfs out now, she’ll bleed out in seconds under his fangs. 

She disentangles her hand from his hair, smooths it down along his neck with a soft scrape of nails and leaves it there, at his jugular, because sometimes, Peter is right. 

Derek sighs and settles in. 

They stay there until morning. 

+

+

**Author's Note:**

> Do I write that sequel, yes or no?
> 
> +
> 
> [My tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/wordsformurder) is now open for fandom business. Come visit.


End file.
